Song of the Subway

After riding the subway over the course of many many months, it is not surprising that a person will begin to develop a nuanced relationship not only to its multicolored pathways, or to the differing widths of a train’s cars, but also to its sounds. When approaching the stairway into a station, the familiar whoosh or screech tells you if a train is leaving or arriving and whether you ought to bother pushing past the couple ambling down the steps with the stroller. In that same moment, a keen ear can also detect whether the low hum of the approaching train is moving uptown or downtown, and whether one ought to risk jumping the turnstile when her metrocard just won’t register on the machine.

Yet these are relatively common skills among the average subway rider, and the sounds they are able to identify are not especially pleasant. But over the last several months I have made an eerie discovery about the sounds of the new trains they have begun to install on the 2/3 and 4/5/6 lines. Most people recognize them by their violet bench seats, but I think of them as the trains that sing the opening line of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. If you know the tune, sing the first three or four words “There’s a place…” It’s a unique melody because the first interval is a minor seventh. It’s dissonant. Foreboding. It resolves to the sixth, but the whir of the subway does not settle there.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was just a coincidence, but I began to realize that all of the new trains sing the same song. There must be a very simple mechanical reason for this, but it made me wonder if somewhere deep in the subway factory some funny little fellow with a love of this song engineered the subway to sing it just so.